COLD WAR WILD CARD

When we released my latest book, El crimen de la guerra (soon to be published in English as War Is a Crime against Humanity) toward the end of last year, it would have been hard to predict the current situation, in which the world, practically overnight, has returned to a state not unlike that endured throughout the post-World War II years of the Cold War, which only ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Clearly, the world has not lived in a state of blissful peace since that time. Indeed, there are currently more than thirty armed conflicts being waged worldwide, with the worst of them—such as the war in Syria—claiming tens of thousands of lives and leaving millions homeless and displaced. But it is, nevertheless, the first time since the end of the Cold War that East and West are once again in a divisive mood with Moscow and Western leaders flexing their rhetorical muscles and hovering on the brink of disputes that are potential powder kegs.

Russian President Vladimir Putin: 
Global peace wild card.

The scenarios involved are admittedly complicated and sometimes confusing. But in the midst of it all, there is a wild card that is upping the odds enormously and changing the direction of play away from the tortuous road to world peace and back toward the tense uncertainty of the Cold War era: namely, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Let me hasten to say that, prior to the current clashes of openly opposing policies between Moscow and the Washington-led West—first in Syria and, more recently in Ukraine—the world’s major problem, from the standpoint of actually achieving a state of universal peace, was, and remains, if now with a challenger as well, the United States. And this is true in terms of both omission and commission.

From the administration of Ronald Reagan through that of George W. Bush (and even despite Bill Clinton’s fleeting attempts at tempering “corrective aggression” with diplomatic openness) the United States has acted as a victor and conqueror in the unipolar post-Cold War world, rather than using the enormous strength and moral capital culled from the fall of the Soviet Union to embrace the role of world peacemaker and guarantor of human rights. The US has been much more ready to seize the role of “policing” the world, of being an enforcer and of imposing vigilante “justice”. Washington has, instead of accepting the mature responsibility of fomenting world cooperation, peace and justice, boasted its position as the new Rome and abused its enhanced power by blithely ignoring international law—except as a concept to be thrown in the faces of its opponents—and the multilateral organizations of which it forms part: both the United Nations (for which the US shows consistent disdain) and some of its major NATO allies, in the case, for instance, of its unilateral decision to unleash an illegal war against Iraq.

Consistent with this attitude, Washington has also sidestepped its own domestic traditions of justice and human rights by stripping political prisoners (at Guantanamo and elsewhere) of their unalienable rights and justifying the use of torture and “rendition” (basically the act of the government’s sending political suspects to unsavory venues abroad and allowing foreign intelligence services to do its dirty work for it) when “expedient” as a means of extracting confessions and information. Add to this the idea, even under the liberal administration of Barack Obama, that the United States has “the right” to kill anyone anywhere and at any time if the president (and intelligence services) deem him or her to be “a clear and present threat to security”, and it becomes clear that Washington has done a great deal more to undermine the state of world peace and justice than to enhance it in the years since the Berlin Wall fell. 

But on the upside—an upside that clearly requires a lot of work if world peace is ever to be achieved—for the past quarter-century the rules have been clear about who had the last word in world geopolitics. And although this might not have been an ideal situation by any stretch of the imagination, it at least prevented any thought of an eventual armed conflict among the world’s major powers. This was, then, despite the scores of regionally fought wars and the atrocities that they engendered, the prime difference between the pre and post-Cold War world—a difference that, if nothing else, permitted the planet to sleep at night without fear that nuclear titans might go off on each other at any moment and destroy humankind as a whole (a fear that accompanied us daily through the decades from the 1950s to the 1980s).

Putin in his days as a KGB officer.

Now, however, the shadow of a tense bipolar world is rearing its awful head once more, as Vladimir Putin and his tandem power-mate Dimitry Medvedev seek to materialize their dream of returning Russia to the “glory days” of Joseph Stalin or of the czarist empire. To many, the world crisis that is currently developing with Ukraine as its epicenter—so much so that the devastating war that rages on in Syria, where the geopolitical policies of Moscow and Washington first clashed head-on is practically forgotten—seems to have emerged overnight. But it is, in fact, merely the flash point for what has been a patient waiting game on the part of Putin, who is, unquestionably, Russia’s current strongman. And although Putin’s hardline stance on Crimea and Ukraine as a whole might appear to some to be extemporaneous and reckless, patience would actually seem to be one of his greatest virtues.

If one looks objectively at Vladimir Putin’s lengthy career in the Russian intelligence community before he entered politics, he almost appears to have been singularly unambitious. Despite attempts by his supporters and detractors alike to picture him as a former James Bond-style super-spy—a role that his slavish dedication to martial arts has helped perpetuate—the truth, by all carefully researched accounts, is that he was a fairly colorless bureaucrat during his long years in the KGB (state security bureau) before he eventually retired as a lieutenant colonel. Be that as it may, he wasn’t wasting his time there, but learning the inner workings of the State and reading the trends leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall so as to be on the right side of history when that happened. And he played his cards well.

It took Putin only five years, from his entrance into politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991, to form part of the political cabinet of President Boris Yeltsin. And after a scant three years of working close enough to Yeltsin to learn the controversial leader’s every move, Putin swiftly and agilely scaled the wall to the top, where, at the end of 1999, he was appointed acting president, replacing his mentor, Yeltsin, who resigned suddenly amidst charges of widespread corruption under his government’s administration. Putin immediately won the 2000 presidential elections and was reelected in 2004. Since Russian law prohibited him from running for a third consecutive term, Putin found a kindred spirit in Dimitry Medvedev, who, upon winning the 2008 presidential elections, named him prime minister, thus permitting Putin to maintain a position of political dominance. At the end of Medvedev’s term, Putin announced that he would be running for a new non-consecutive term as president. He easily won his bid, despite the bitter protests of his opponents, and named Medvedev to be his prime minister, thus giving birth to a relationship between the two that detractors have dubbed a “tandemocracy”, in which the country’s two most powerful posts are passed back and forth between them. Their tightening grip on political power, government reforms carried out to create a vertical governance structure, state intervention in the business world, Putin’s own near-rock star status among his huge popular following and his government’s stress on law and order combined with harsh crackdowns on dissent and noteworthy limitations that the administration has placed on freedom of expression, among other indicators, have earned him a reputation among his opponents for being undemocratic.

Medvedev and Putin, a wild card "tandemocracy"

On the foreign policy front, Putin has, until the most recent deterioration of East-West relations, done a careful balancing act, becoming an early post- 9/11 supporter of the US War on Terror, through which he garnered friendly relations with then-US President George W. Bush. But he later withheld support for the US invasion of Iraq, as the United States simultaneously backed expansion of the 28-nation NATO pact’s lines of defense to areas near Russia’s borders. Of greatest concern to Putin were US plans to build missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic and ever friendlier ties between NATO in general and the US in particular and the now independent countries of the former Soviet Union. Since 2007, the Russian president has made no secret of his aim of achieving a “multi-polar world” and his violent invasion of former Soviet satellite Georgia in 2008 made it clear that Moscow wouldn’t stand idly by and permit its sphere of influence to defect to the West.

Putin has ridden to power on the strength of his undeniable rebuilding of the Russian economy after it collapsed in tune with the Berlin Wall and with the dismantling of the former Soviet Union. He has largely been the reorganizer of the Russian Federation as a whole in the post-Soviet world. He courted the West long enough to create a measure of economic interdependence, but with the balance arguably leaning toward the side of Russia, which has so addicted some of the countries of Western Europe to its oil and gas that it will be exceedingly difficult for them to wean themselves from these Russian resources anytime in the near future. And this last fact is what has made it hard for Washington to generate the kind of enthusiasm it has sought with regard to severely sanctioning Russia for its annexation of the Crimean region of Ukraine and for its war-like posturing on Ukraine’s southern and eastern borders, in retaliation for Kiev’s sharp turn toward the West.

Ucranian troops face off with pro-Russian militias in annexed
Crimea. Original photo posted on Twitter by James Mates

Armed with these patiently built strengths, Putin now finds himself and his country powerful enough once more to present a viable challenge to the unipolar model that the United States has enjoyed for the past 25 years. First in Syria (a key chess piece in Putin’s naval strategy and missile warfare capabilities)—where he has strongly and materially backed the 40-year dictatorship that the West is seeking to topple—and now, much more actively, in rebellious neighboring Ukraine, Putin has made it clear that “his Russia” plans to be a major global player in the same way that the Soviet Union was, and that, as such, it is, if directly challenging the West, only doing what the United States does within its own sphere of influence: namely, defending its strategic interests.

Putin’s Russia, then, has drawn a new line in the sand, basically sending out the message that it is taking the controversial action that it is, simply because it can, and that it will continue to do so as it sees fit. That said, this is only a threat to global peace in as much as the West, and more specifically the United States, take the bait and respond in kind, heeding the saber-rattling of a hawkish right wing instead of consolidating an unequivocal and joint liberal response by all Western nations, aimed at isolating Putin and Moscow diplomatically, politically and economically until Russia de-escalates its actions and deigns to become a force for world peace and cooperation instead of an active element in the potential causes of world conflict.